The bi-weekly seminars on Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking (SGEP) recently invited two distinguished guest speakers to have conversations with the cohort of fellows. One of the speakers was Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. In his speech, Dr. Mehta discussed the changing relationship between expertise and democratic politics, especially the challenges posed within populist contexts. Dr. Mehta serves as a contributing editor at the India Express and you can find his newly published writings here. Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta was recently selected as the 2021 Social Science Research Council Fellow.
The second guest speaker was Dr. Gil Eyal, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Dr. Eyal lectured on the crisis of expertise in Western liberal democracies. His speech was based on his newly published book, The Crisis of Expertise. For more information about the book, please see here. Dr. Eyal’s recent publications include “Clinical Signs Associated with Earlier Diagnosis of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder” with Sicherman et al. in BMC Pediatrics (2021); “The Sociology of Personal Identification”, co-authored with Brensinger, in Sociological Theory (2021); “Whose Advice is Credible? Claiming Lay Expertise in a Covid-19 Online Community”, co-authored with Au in Qualitative Sociology (2021); “Is precision medicine relevant in the age of COVID-19?” with Zhou et al. in Genetics in Medicine (2021); and his “Response to Riccardo Emilio Chesta’s ‘What Is Critical About the Crisis of Expertise? A review of Gil Eyal’s The Crisis of Expertise’” (2019, Cambridge: Polity Press) in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (2021).
